I’ve just been watching a video, presented by Richard G. Baraniuk of Rice University, (part of the Google TechTalks series) on Connexions a non-profit start-up launched at Rice University in 1999 that aims to reinvent how we write, edit, publish, and use textbooks. Very inspirational and certainly worth a deeper look.
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Google runs a regular programme of educational presentations by eminent software developers about interesting web and code development technologies, tools and techniques. The great thing is that the presentations are videoed and put on-line on Google video. It also seems to go out and about in recording events at local user groups and records those as well. I discovered this great resource a couple of days ago and have been taking advantage of the Easter break to soak some of this good stuff during the Easter break. Probably the best way to find something of interest is to go to Google video and search for tag *engEDU*. Google video provides an facility to generate RSS from tags, so the easy way to keep up to date is to subscribe to the feed: http://video.google.co.uk/videofeed?type=search&q=engEDU&output=rss. If you do this in Google reader, the video is embedded right there in your RSS reader.
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Just updated my template to rounders 2. Gotta keep things fresh right?
Under the heading of *it might be useful* I signed up with Twitter. There don’t seem to be any tools (extensions, google gadgets, etc) that make it easy to use from Firefox as it seems that SMS and Instant Messaging would seem to be the preferred interface. And I guess for the purpose (quick notes to say what you’re doing) that makes sense. I’ll have to install an AIM client now though!
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After a recommendation in this week’s Technology Guardian I discovered LibraryThing another beta/web2.0/link/social/tagging web site. This time for books. I’ve started putting my book collection into it. Apart from the benefits of having a complete library catalogue on-line, the social networking aspects could be interesting. It can also be used in marking books for a class reading list. See EG-146 Reading List as an example.
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It’s the end of another term. Four weeks without students but lots of boring admin to do.
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I’ve just returned to my office after attending a Lunch and Learn session on Blogging and the uses of Blogging in education. Nichola van den Berg from LIS was the presenter and she gave a very nice introduction to blogging to an audience of academics who were new to the subject. A couple of things that I took away from the session were (1) I could do more to get my students blogging and (2) I could do more with this blog.
The idea of my EG-153 blogging exercise is to get students to recognise the benefits of blogging as a research tool. It sort of works, but I don’t think they become bloggers as a result. It occurs to me that blogging would also be a great way opf supporting their LEAP activities. Another couple of ideas that come immediately to mind are Blogs would make a reasonable alternative to log books; group blogs would be useful for GDEs; and research blogs would help in planning and gatherinhg materials for the dissertation project.
It could also be versy useful for reflectingon my own teaching and professional development, which is why I need to use it more. Question is do I reflect here or in a separate blog?
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p>Some of these were illustrated in Nichola’s talk so I know that they work elsewhere. Expect more on this topic!
I have just registered for the domain cpjobling.org via the free version of Google Apps. I’ve got a new web site up and running but it’s a bit sparse. However at only $10 for nominet site registration and free web, application, email and collaboration hosting (within limits) it’s a snip!
Three items of note from Charles Nutter’s ‘blog: 1. JRuby 0.9.8 has been released with 98% support for Ruby on Rails. The road to a 1.0 release seems well signposted.
3. Netbeans support for Ruby and JRuby is “even better than expected” (see the demos on Roman Strobl’s blog)
5. Ruby on Grails – Charles has analyzed the contents of the grails project and concludes that it could easily be fronted by JRuby rather than Groovy. Grails developer Graeme Rocher agrees. I would comment that that’s the beauty of dynamic languages: it leverages your investment in libraries and APIs!
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Glen Smith has launched a new blog aggregation site called GroovyBlogs.org. Created in just 20 hours in Grails, the site attempts to gather all the news that’s hot in the Groovy world and present it in one place. The source code is also available.